For the fourth assignment, I chose the second option. I specifically chose one of my housemates as my victim, knowing that our friendship of three years would come in handy for this assignment. I typed up a survey similar to Catalina’s and gave it to my friend. She circled 5 for every single section of her profile and then I looked over her profile carefully, testing my knowledge of her personal information, education and interests. With the exception of a couple of inside jokes and sarcastic comments about her major and semester job, her profile was 100% accurate.

I have to admit, when I first saw Catalina’s experiment with match.com profiles, I thought I would have similar findings for this assignment. However, when I really thought about it I realized that most people on Facebook get an account to keep in touch with old friends from high school and to ‘stalk’ people at their own school after meeting them on campus. Why would someone lie about their interests, education or personal information? Personally, I knew most of my friends before I made my Facebook account and I wouldn’t really friend anyone who would judge me based on what I choose to share on my Facebook. Depending on how you interpret assertion and conventional signals, Facebook consists of mostly conventional signals --- It would be really uncomfortable and in most cases pointless to lie about personal information or education. However, I guess it would be easier to justify lying about interests to portray a certain persona.

After discussing the assignment with my friend and evaluating her profile, she agreed with my observations and voiced her opinion that it just wasn’t worth the time or energy lying about some of the information you could possibly put on Facebook. Unlike math.com, we didn’t think that the purpose of Facebook was to find a prospective significant other or to impress anyone. If that was the case, then anyone could potentially adjust their information to fit anyone’s preferences quite easily if they really wanted to.

I think that the Social Distance Theory applies most to Facebook. In most cases, Facebook is not that socially distant. I know that if I tried to lie on my Facebook, I would get called out on it right away with tons of wall comments and it would just be awkward. Perhaps since you don’t really expect your friends to find you on a dating network, it is less awkward to lie and the added social distance accommodates one’s desire to cover up flaws without worrying about being called on it. Maybe that is why Catalina’s experiment detected some lies. After all this speculation the Social Distance Theory definitely makes a lot of sense. A lie on Facebook would be detected by good friends in a heartbeat. Being caught in a lie in public is quite embarrassing and I don’t know anyone who would enjoy being called out on lying on Facebook.

http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-deception.html

http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-profile-interview.html